'RAMageddon' hits consumer electronics as AI drains chip supply

'RAMageddon' hits consumer electronics as AI drains chip supply(ft.com)

25 points by sbulaev 1 day ago | 12 comments

Mattified 23 hours ago |

Off-topic, but this article brought my first time to see a "scan the QR to verify you're human" from reCaptcha. I hope this doesn't become a thing, because I never, ever do that.

simulator5g 23 hours ago |

You can't even read a single line of the article at this link, its just a full page ad obscured by various popups.

adrian_b 20 hours ago | |

The archive link given by another poster works for me.

What matters is the pessimistic conclusion of the article:

> "The uplift in prices is anticipated to persist for as long as the AI supercycle lasts. “I think we’re still in the sort of early stages [of price increases],” said Dhillon, adding that “there’s a lot more to come in the pipeline”."

p0w3n3d 20 hours ago |

What about the cartel? Have they punished Samsung and Hynix yet?

RataNova 20 hours ago | |

Even if there is a cartel it's secondary now because Nvidia is basically vacuuming up half of Hynix's output for Blackwell and leaving the retail market to fight over the scraps

mrheosuper 22 hours ago |

I remember the HW shortage during 2020-2021, fun time.

bitwize 21 hours ago | |

This is going to last longer.

The economics of owning your own powerful hardware make sense less and less with each passing year. Compute that's rented from the cloud gets far more utilization per dollar spent, and that's just on the hardware costs, let alone the cost of electricity to run it. What we're seeing now is the market adjusting to this new reality, as foundries reallocate capacity from consumer-oriented hardware to gear aimed at superscalers.

y42 21 hours ago | | |

I don't know.... With all those approaches to run AI in your own premise, people need their own hardware. It makes them independent. Of course hyperscalers and AI labs don't like that, but I argue that consumers prefer independence over some costs of operations. If this would be the case, people wouldn't own cars.

sirtaj 20 hours ago | | |

server -> personal -> server -> personal... I've seen this cycle a number of times in the last 40 years. Almost none of the people making any of the software we use are purely using the cloud, they are using powerful personal computers with cloud for GPU. The ubiquity of personal computing is required if we want this industry to keep producing enthusiastic hackers.

imtringued 18 hours ago | | |

If the AI companies ever get the idea that it would make sense for the AI model to modify its KV cache, it would end up adding a write step to the KV cache per token (moderately expensive) and increase the cost of inference by the width of the update (arbitrarily expensive).

This in itself could double or triple the demand for both memory bandwidth and compute. I honestly don't see a future where AI demand disappears...